Begunkodor railway station is located in the Ranchi railway division of the Indian Railways' South Eastern Railway zone. It serves the surrounding towns of Begunkodor and Jhalda in the Purulia district of West Bengal, India. Passengers abandoned the station, and it was dubbed "haunted" in railway records. Railways named the station as one of India's top 10 haunted stations.
A railway employee reported seeing a woman's ghost in 1967, according to the residents of Begunkodor, and it was rumored that she had perished in a railway accident. He informed people about it the next day, but they disregarded him. A first-hand description of the occurrence was published, complete with details of what happened at the time.
The real trouble began when the station master and his family were discovered dead in their apartments. Trains ceased stopping here due to reported paranormal phenomena, hence the station was shuttered. It was the final movement in that area.
The locals organised a group in the late 1990s and petitioned the administration to reopen the station. Local villagers wrote to then-Railway Minister Smt Mamata Banerjee and CPIM politician Basudeb Acharia, who was a member of the parliamentary standing committee on Railways at the time and hails from Purulia. The haunted tag, though, persists. Railway staff, according to Acharia, made up the narrative to avoid being stationed there. The Begunkodor railway station was closed for 42 years until it was reopened in 2009 by Mamata Banerjee, who was the railways minister at the time. Nobody, on the other hand, lingered at the station after 5 p.m. every day. This fear mongering also fueled a thriving 'ghost tourism' industry, which was fueled by urban youth who dared to spend the night at the railway station.
The Begunkodor station has no platform and is empty except for a solitary tubewell, a few signboards, and the 12 ft-by-10 ft ticket desk in a corner, and is located in the middle of a bleak area of land with vacant buildings around – unlike the busy NH 60A nearby. It opens at 4.30 a.m. and shuts about 5.30 p.m. after nightfall. The counter reopens for a few minutes at 9 p.m. for the last train of the day, but no one ever buys a ticket. The ten to twelve passengers on board are largely everyday bettors heading home.
Only about half a dozen other local trains halt at the station, though it is located on the main line between West Bengal and Jharkhand, most of them before sunset, and it doesn't figure on the computerised ticketing system of South Eastern Railways.
Despite the fact that 10 trains stop here on a daily basis, customers avoid utilising the station after sunset. Many ghost hunters have visited the station several times and confirmed that there are no ghosts present. For a long time, some people have promoted Begunkodor railway station as a ghost tourist attraction in order to attract visitors. As Begunkodar is a Naxal stronghold, no one wanted to risk their lives working there. The station is located on the edge of a thick woodland range that is part of the "red corridor" — areas afflicted by the Naxalite conflict — and is said to be the Naxalite insurgents' gateway to Bengal. It's also likely because of this that the station has no full-time railway staff, making it difficult for it to progress beyond its current status as a halt station.
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